


The Fish and the Bee

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Universe, Elements, Retirement, Return, Reunion, The Adventure of the Empty House, sort of a fairytale
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-29
Updated: 2013-05-29
Packaged: 2017-12-13 07:04:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/821415
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John has a daughter who is water, who is earth.</p><p>Sherlock comes home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Fish and the Bee

**Author's Note:**

> A companion for [ "River Gods"](http://archiveofourown.org/works/434000)

 

When Sherlock has been gone nearly two years, Meredith Morstan comes from the sea to make off with a measure of John Watson’s heart. Marine biologist, mermaid, summer-born; she is all water. He is too though, and Sherlock for all his disappearance is (was) winter-born earth.

*******

She can reckon by the stars.

John could marry her, pregnant, with platinum rings and the distant wash of the Atlantic, the memory of something stronger, more salient, more true.

He wants to stay with her, marry or no. She wants to take their girl to sea, and she does, and Tahra Hamish Morstan is born early and shipside, many kilometers from shore.

*******

Sherlock was born at 12:01 a.m., the crossroads, on a snowbound sixth of January, the earth at perihelion and the sea at high tide.

“Oh,” said his grey-eyed mum, “he’ll be wise.”

“No Mum,” said his sharp-eyed brother, “not wise, bright.”

He dies on a day he doesn’t care to remember.

The earth swallows him, and then he’s born again.

*******

His back is bruised black and his toes are afire and he can’t speak and his hair’s full of salt and iron-fed soil.

“God,” John says, gulps his shock, aspirates, drowns, revives, bursts to the surface, feels it in his feet where they join the ground, his arms where they drag him ashore.

*******

“You're going to be a father,” Mer said.

When Tahra is born she's kelp-locked and smiling, twining her tiny fingers.

Her father’s called John and she carries his middle name.

Her mother almost named her Miren, sea-fair, but thought it too obvious. Her father is summer-born, river-born, or no, a lake, a tarn deep in the highlands, mysteries beneath.

Your father, her mum whispers, loves fiercely the one person, the one, who can divert him longest from death, who keeps him bound to the world.  

It’s something she understands as the current, as the fish and the seal and the petrel and the fog-bow. 

She carries the words ashore.

*******

You came back, John thinks, bruised black as humus.  
  
The flat still smelled of the sea.  
  
You. Limped for six weeks but your nerves were fine. Your spine. I doctored you. You smelled of soil and salt and three years of blood. I touched you and it was only what I do.  But it was you.

*******

“You always wanted to be a father,” Sherlock says.

“She lives mostly with her mother,” John says.

“It doesn't matter,” Sherlock says, “where she lives.”

Fits his mouth to John’s brief and sweet as a tear.

Breathes.

*******

Anger is earth. Ire, no that’s fire. It’s rooted and hot.

John misses the sea sometimes, wonders at her strange patterns, at his own.

Anger is fire.

Sherlock came back wild, strange, speechless, his mouth full of iron.

And no more time for death.

*******

Sometimes the sea blows inland and London goes under.

Sherlock’s been back six months when he picks a lock and John sees the twinned loops round their pale wrists gleaming in the shadow like treasure glimmering from the deeps.  
  
“It wasn't so bad,” Sherlock says, “running bound.”  
  
“No,” John says, “it wasn't so bad.”  
  
Sherlock sets down a flask of acid, runs the water, picks up the bow.  

John puts down the gun.  
  
“I think,” Sherlock says. Makes a motion that means “lock.”  
  
“Yes,” says John.  Makes a gesture that means “anchor.”

*******

Mer drafts in with the tide. Smiles at John out of another life, kisses Sherlock, his hands full of experiment, the first time she meets him, on the forehead.  

Tahra at two, at five, calls Sherlock something to be cupped close.

Takes both of their hands.

Sherlock lights the burner.

John opens the window.

Let’s in the air.

*******

There are crimes. So many of them.

Killers track dirt through London.

The Thames and the Lea wash up the bodies.

There are injuries, near-deaths.

Shouts and tumblings and sinkings and risings.

The sweet sharp salinity of life.

*******

Her eyes are grey and her hair is green (at least during the uni years), gold-brown otherwise, citrine and verdigris like seaweed and sand.  At twenty she tears up the path of a cottage with a garden of herbs and a colony of hives; named for the earth, sea-born, the salt of the sea, the fish and the bee, the silver of _cypselurus_ and the golden of _apis,_ runs into the arms of the two who live there, bound in the bed like aquifer and earth.

**Author's Note:**

> Tahra: "earth," "growth"
> 
> Mermaid-marine biologist MM inspired by Bill Forsyth’s  “Local Hero”
> 
>  [Fog bow over the ocean](http://www.pixheaven.net/photo_us.php?nom=080223_9940)
> 
>  For real fairytales, [wiggleofjudas](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wiggleofjudas/pseuds/wiggleofjudas)!


End file.
